Lears

If you’re a British person of a certain age, you know Michael Pennington as a distinguished classical actor, belonging to the same generation as Sir Ian McKellen but lacking his blockbuster credentials. If you’re a New Yorker, you can see Pennington at the Theatre for a New Audience, playing King Lear for the first time, in a production directed by Arin Arbus. Pennington and McKellen first met in 1976, in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “Romeo and Juliet”—Sir Ian was Romeo, Pennington was Mercutio—and the other day McKellen stopped by Pennington’s theatre, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, for a chat.

“I’m sure we’d agree that Shakespeare is very, very helpful to his actors,” McKellen said. “You are not fighting Shakespeare. It’s wonderful, so reassuring. You come to Brecht, or Beckett—they are much less helpful. We like to think Shakespeare was an actor, and therefore was on our side.”

“It is expected that there are certain things that you will do at certain stages,” Pennington said. “About ten or fifteen years ago, I thought, I’m supposed to want to play Lear, but I don’t know if I want to. What does Ralph Richardson supposedly say about Lear?”

“I don’t know it verbatim, but: You’re wandering along, and the sun is out and the daffodils are blooming and the birds are singing, and nothing is wrong and—oh! You get your foot caught in a Lear,” McKellen said.

“Well, I didn’t want to get my foot caught in a Lear,” Pennington said. “And then I was playing Richard Strauss, the composer—who is not a particularly Lear-like character, except that he is an old man who regrets things he’s done in the past—and I was washing the dishes one morning, and I thought, I want to play Lear. I do. And then there was a tremendous slew of Lears, whatever is the generic name—”

“A larynx of Lears,” McKellen said.

“A larynx of Lears. And I held on to do it here, because it struck me as such a cool thing to do, to come to New York and do it with an American cast. And I suppose I thought I could do it. Technically, it is a long and arduous part. It is emotionally challenging, but it is also practically and vocally challenging.”

“When I was doing Lear, at BAM, I fell asleep during a break and couldn’t be found,” McKellen said. “I was all wrapped up on the sofa in my dressing room; they couldn’t see me.”

“They thought it was just a bundle of rags! Did they say, ‘We can’t find Ian McKellen?’ ”

“The play just stopped. They said, ‘There has been a technical hitch.’ I was just by the stage, and the person who said that said, ‘Oh, no, here he is.’ Enter technical hitch.”

“Full of apology.”

“There’s another Shakespeare mountain that has no appeal to me—Falstaff,” McKellen went on. “Ooh! No, thank you.”

“Coriolanus, that’s a brute,” Pennington said. “He’s like rockface, like Lear. There are certain parts—some nights you look at it and you can’t think where you are supposed to grapple on at all. Of course, then you start and you find a way of doing it, but it’s not an easy entry, ever.”

“ ‘Richard II’ you can’t really fail; it’s very, very simple. It’s all laid out for you, if you’re reasonably pretty, and you get a move on with it,” McKellen said.

“I don’t think I found it as easy as that,” Pennington said. “I think I seriously tried to make it a play about revolution—”

“There you go—”

“Whereas in fact it’s a big, showoff lyric tragedy.”

McKellen hadn’t yet been to see Pennington’s Lear, but he was planning to do so as soon as his own obligations permitted: he was winding up a stint on Broadway, in “No Man’s Land” and “Waiting for Godot.” Pennington said, “This guy has, in the most genial way, set the bar so high all my working life—that’s my big speech, and I won’t make another one—and it matters a great deal when he comes.”

McKellen gently stroked his friend’s arm. “Aw,” he said.

“I went to see ‘No Man’s Land,’ ” Pennington continued, “and I went home thinking, I must attend to that. Not that Spooner’s like Lear, but there are certain aspects of being an actor—”

“That always happens if you are enjoying a show, doesn’t it?” McKellen said. “If you see someone really inhabiting a part, and you don’t want to work out how it’s done, you just think, Well, I can’t do that. And then the actor who has been doing it comes and says the same thing about you. So lovely! Lovely.” ♦

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